Luke (Gordon Joseph Weiss) and Angela (Samantha Soule) strike a deal in David Van Asselt’s very adult fairy tale (photo by Paula Court)
Cherry Lane Mainstage Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Tuesday – Sunday through June 28, $66
212-989-2020
www.rattlestick.org
www.cherrylanetheatre.org
On the way out of A Fable, Rattlestick artistic director and cofounder David Van Asselt’s very adult fairy tale running at the Cherry Lane, my companion could barely even look at me, muttering, “The less said about this the better.” A Fable is a bewildering fiasco, an antiwar romance complete with the pre-advertised “extreme acts of violence including rape, gunshots, stabbing, and poisoning” as well as a touch of perplexing burlesque. Director Daniel Talbott (Scarcity, Slipping) and the cast seem lost as the fractured narrative attempts to mix Homer, Sophocles, and Shakespeare with the Brothers Grimm in a kitchen-sink approach that even includes a few mind-numbing songs by Liz Swados (Runaways, Trilogy). The story involves a soldier named Jonny (Hubert Point-Du Jour) whose army unit has raped and beaten a young woman named Chandra (Dawn-Lyen Gardner), along with her mother (Liza Fernandez) and father (Alok Tewari), and left them for dead. Of course, Jonny instantly falls for Chandra. Soon Jonny is off on a downward-spiraling journey trying to reunite his true love with her father, each scene more baffling than the previous one. Meanwhile, the proceedings are sort of being manipulated by Angela the angel (Samantha Soule) and Luke the devil (Gordon Joseph Weiss). It’s impossible to tell if this multigenre exercise is supposed to be camp, serious, tongue-in-cheek, or all three, resulting in a confounding mess that digs an early hole it can’t get out of. Indeed, the less said the better, and we’ve already said too much.